Finally a little truth......Maybe

Perhaps the most difficult aspect to our situation is the fact that we're not allowed to talk about it. I think I've mentioned before that our boss put a big giant gag order on the 3 of us last month. We can chat about this to our hearts' content among the ourselves and obviously with friends and family who have nothing to do with this institution. But, we are not in any way allowed to mention this to anyone here, especially within our department. Our boss said that we're just to go along our daily lives around here and "come July 1st, people will just notice a change in the lab." (You think?) The problem with this is that our department is tiny - everyone knows what's going on in everyone else's lab. And our boss is just a little bit crazy to think that people aren't going to figure out that something is up in here even if we don't come right out and say it.

But we've respected his wishes to the greatest degree possible. There are definitely a few people who know. I was sitting down at lunch that day with a technician when the grad student came to find me to warn me that the boss would be looking for me - she obviously knew something bad was up. And then two weeks later she too was told by her own boss that she was out of a job after June 30th. It was a horrible moment when she came sobbing into our lab and all we could do was say we're sorry. But we've very quietly let her know that she's not alone and she's been very good about keeping it to herself. There's another tech who's husband's lab is in a very similar situation as ours and she too knows that two of us are on our way out. It's clear that she really needs and wants to talk to us about it, but we can't and so we leave her hanging every time she looks hopeful that we'll talk about it.

Harder than those interactions are the ones in which people stop by just to chat and somewhere along the way ask us if our boss is nervous because of the funding situation or are we still employed or what's wrong with our boss (who has been in a perpetually and obviously bad mood for 6 weeks now - how we want to kick him in the head for calling so much attention to himself and the situation while the 3 of us motor along pretending everything is ok is a subject for another post). None of us want to lie. That's not our style. Instead, we've become masters of deflection. "Oh, he's been in a bad mood for a while now." "Everyone is nervous because of the money situation." And so on.

Today though, I got the first glimmer that we might be able to stop completely avoiding the situation.

In a previous post I explained the ease of convincing my boss that I should not have to give my scheduled seminar, now just under a month away. He sent me on my way to come up with a legitimate excuse for why I could not give that talk on that day. And so this morning I went knocking on his door with two options: 1) We've talked and with just 9 months of a postdoc under my belt I simply don't have the amount of data yet to make giving the presentation worthwhile for anyone involved, including those who would have to waste an hour sitting through my talk. I will be sure to sign up for the earliest date during next year's postdoc seminar cycle. And that would be an absolutely true statement - if I were still going to be a postdoc next year. And if I really had to have a reason for being off campus that day 2) There's a career development day at Major University in the next city over that day about science education that we've agreed is more important for me to attend that to give this seminar on that exact day. I'll reschedule. This one would be a complete lie and didn't make me too comfortable, but if it's what he preferred.......

Once again my boss surprised me. Instead of having me deal with the situation using one of those excuses he said that he was going to talk to the PI in charge of the seminar series and he was going to be (gasp) up front with him. He'd tell him that I really didn't have the data to make a seminar worthwhile and coupled with the fact that my position is about to be terminated (I have really come to loathe that word) should equal a pass as far as this seminar is concerned. So, not only do I (maybe) not have to lie but my boss is apparently starting to warm up to the fact that we can be honest about this. I'm not sure how long this will last or how far we'll get with it (perhaps this next PI will also have to keep this to himself) but at least it's a step in the right direction. Baby steps are better than no steps as far as I'm concerned.

Different Perspectives

There is a job opening at my institution for a Research Scientist. Essentially, a research scientist has the same role as a postdoc - they have a Ph.D., they are responsible for independent research within their lab, they must give presentations and work toward publication of manuscripts and they are often responsible for training graduate students and postdocs. The one big difference between a research scientist and a postdoc is that the RS has no intention of ever running her own lab and therefore the RS position is an 8-5 job.

I have been debating with myself for a week now about whether or not to apply for this job. My outlook as far as getting the sort of teaching position I would like is grim. And I've mentioned before in this blog how I feel about wanting to positively contribute to our life. If I decided to stay at the bench I would certainly be happier with an 8-5 job rather than what I've got now, which is more like "You're a horrible scientist if you leave after having been in the lab for any less than 10 hours and if you go home and aren't constantly thinking about your project and if you aren't here all weekend." That being said - I'm sure this wouldn't just be an 8-5 job, I don't really want to stay at the bench and this would certainly close all doors on a teaching career (I'm 99% certain that there would be no flexibility there for me to take days off to teach).

Really, my motivation for thinking I should go after this position is that I would still have a paycheck and I would still have my own insurance. In the grand scheme of life those aren't the most important things, especially considering that a) we can survive on S's salary and b) I can get on S's insurance without any hassle.

S does not think I should apply for this job. Again, (and I'll repeat this a whole lot more I'm sure) he's amazingly supportive of me finding the right job this time, even if that means I'm at home for a while before I find that position. Most of my friends and my family don't think I should apply for this job - for the same reasons above. There's even this nagging feeling that this might be the "right" time (there's never a right or perfect time for this) to have a kid. This is a notion heavily supported by my Mother and at least one very close friend. After talking to any of them, S included, I feel confident again about the possibility of not transitioning immediately into another job.

And then I get to work and have a conversation with J, our technician who is also frantically searching for a job and all that security goes out the window. She really thinks I should apply for the RS job. She thinks it would be fine to do that for a year and then look for teaching positions again (even though I know that I'll have an even harder time then than I am now given yet another year between me and my last teaching experience). Also, I won't get hired for this position if they have even an inkling that I'd jump ship so soon. J said I don't have to let on that that's my plan (which is true, but people have a pretty good sense of what an interviewee's mindset is, even if we think we're playing the game really well).

I have to keep reminding myself of the different places that J and I are coming from. I've spent all my time since college working toward my goal of teaching. J got this job right out of college and is perfectly happy to tell you that she has no desire to go to graduate school and she is very happy working a regular job and going home to her husband and dog each night. I also would like children and some point and have always struggled with myself and how I would manage to do both my job and being a mother well not to mention trying to figure out when I could manage to have a kid without killing my career. It's hard not to view this as a big giant sign. J doesn't want children so not getting a new job and having this chance to be at home for a little while really doesn't make sense in her life. Once I remind myself of these differences I feel better again.

It is interesting though to take a step back and remember that even though J and I are in essentially the same situation we have very different takes on the situation and how we feel about our jobs/careers and what comes next. That being said, I think I'll focus on the people who are thinking the same way I am about this whole thing........

Insult to Injury

When the economy soured, the institution where I work lost a large portion of its endowment. The powers that be got together, decided how much money each department needed to give back and then left it to the department chairs to decide how and where they would get that money. I don't envy the decisions that our chair had to make and, being as objective as I possibly can, I understand why she made the decisions she did.

But that didn't stop me (and a large portion of my department) from getting angry this morning over what greeted us as we walked in the department. On the counters immediately below the departmental mailboxes (located just outside the main office, in a central, public location) she had placed 3 copies of a sign up sheet. For what were we to sign up for?

To buy coffee as part of a fund raiser to help her kids (and others in their high school) go on a trip to France.

Really. I wish I were kidding. Now, don't get me wrong. This is a fairly common occurrence - the department chair from my previous location offered us the chance to buy Girl Scout cookies from her girls every year. And apparently in my current department many PI's will take their kids' fund raisers to school, my boss included when he puts out the box of candy bars to raise money for his daughter's soccer team. But seriously? Our department chair, who just a month ago decided to un-hire a bunch of us and who has more money than she knows what to do with (have I mentioned that her husband is the head of a major research center within our institution as well) wants us to send her kids to France by spending money (which we now are trying to save since we have no idea when a new job will come along) on coffee?

I don't think so. And I'm not alone.

Based on what my lab-mates told me, when the department chair has done this in the past her lab members and other PI's are the only ones who sign up. Those are both groups of people with obligations to her. But I'm not so sure this year. As of the end of the day there were only two names on that list - a research scientist in her lab and one PI, who does happen to be a coffee junkie, so he's not simply sucking up. As for me, I certainly have no intention of spending money on that particular cause.

Tales from the Lab

While all this job searching is going on, I'm still coming into the lab and working full days and so I thought I'd start throwing up some stories from the lab up here simply for your enjoyment.

Our boss has slowly been getting better. He talks to us a bit more every day and is now in a decent mood 2-3 days of the week. Still not back to normal, but better. This morning he walked to the doorway of our lab, didn't say a word and with both hand did the "come with me" finger motion. The last time he did that to me I got told I was losing my job. Needless to say my stomach flipped over. Turns out that it wasn't really that much of a big deal. My official first day of work was July 7th of last year and since I signed a 1 year contract that would make my official last day July 6th. Well, the administration wants to clean out at the end of the fiscal year, meaning that my last day has to be June 30th. I reassured my boss that I had kind of assumed we were going with fiscal year and that a week wasn't going to make or break me. He was very relieved, although I'm not sure why he was so nervous about telling me I had a week less than I may have thought.

Our graduate student has just submitted a first authored paper. Actually, our boss did the physical submission - he's a bit of a control nut like that. It's been a long time coming. When I first joined the lab the paper was supposed to be submitted in September. A publication would be a great boost for the lab. Maybe not the boost needed to get more funding and keep going, but a boost nonetheless. The process of getting this paper together has been painful to watch. I'm hoping that the reviews come in with minimal changes to be done for all of our sakes. We'll see.

My department is seminar-obsessed. We have faculty yearly updates every-other Monday at noon. The in between weeks are for the postdoc yearly updates. Tuesday mornings at 11 we have an invited speaker seminar series. Thursday mornings at 11 we've got student seminars and Friday's at noon we have student research in progress seminars. Everyone is pretty much expected to show up at every seminar but that doesn't always happen. I was "raised" by a PI who really didn't want to sit through a seminar unless you were going to tell her a whole, nice neat story. She found "in progress" seminars to be a waste of time. Additionally, I came from a department that was not at all seminar obsessed. We had a weekly invited speaker that I always went to because the speakers were generally very good and we had a weekly "in progress" seminar only ran from September to May, featured graduate students and postdocs, but we weren't required to participate every year. Basically, in the summer the coordinator would e-mail the PI's and ask for a few names from each lab. Our boss put us on the schedule if we had something useful to say and that was about it. Because of all this I'm very choosy about what seminars I go to. I make great effort to go to the outside speakers' and the PIs' talks out of respect. Everything else is negotiable with my schedule.

I am scheduled to give my seminar on April 20th. I knew going in that it was going to be horrible - I will have 9 months of postdoc under my belt by then and while things are getting there, I certainly won't have enough of one coherent story to make it worthwhile. I had finally convinced myself that it would be fine. No one would expect me to have moved mountains in 9 months and I could give a sampling of the things I'm getting off the ground. Then I found out I wouldn't have that time to follow up on anything I'm doing and in my head my seminar truly became a profound waste of time for all involved. I decided that I wasn't going to give that seminar - now all I had to do was convince the boss who is a bit of a stickler for seminars (and for hiding the fact that there's not a thing wrong in here). I've put it off for a month and I've rehearsed all my logical reasons for why I should cancel and I even asked my husband how to best approach the subject (he's much better at phrasing and dealing with people in general). This morning was the ideal opportunity to bring it up since I was in the boss' office anyway. And so I took a deep breath and launched into my request. The "conversation" went something like this:

C: So, I have a question. Actually not so much a question, but a request. (Big breath) So, I'm supposed to be giving a seminar in a month......

The Boss: "Cancel it."

C: (shocked silence) "That was easy."

The Boss: "Come up with a good excuse and cancel it and just don't reschedule."

It was a nice and unexpected boost to my day. Sometimes people can surprise you.

Two Applications Out.....

There is not a lot for me to report from the job front. I sent off the application materials to the local technical college with the full time position. I immediately got the auto-response saying that they'd received my e-mail, so at least I didn't have to sit around worrying that my files were lost somewhere in cyberspace. I haven't, however, heard from the dean there that I've been communicating with. I'm chalking this up to one of two things: 1) He's super-busy and/or 2) He might think it's a good thing for me to apply for this job but can't really be giving me "insider" tips and so maybe there will be e-mail silence for a bit. Unfortunately for me, this means waiting for a few weeks - the auto-response said that I would be contacted about two weeks after the close of the application period. That's still a little over three weeks away. I thought that I would sit around obsessing over hearing about an interview, but it turns out that knowing I won't hear from them anytime soon is a good thing. I've put thoughts of this application to the back of my brain and have been able to concentrate on other things.

Two days ago, as I was going through the daily check of the websites I came across an advertisement for an instructor position in Microbiology. Now, Microbiology isn't my exact field, but I've had to deal with quite a bit of it over the years. Additionally, this advertisement went on to say that besides Microbiology, the qualified candidate would be proficient in A, B and C.....all of which are my field and so I figured I would apply. This one was pretty easy, they just wanted me to e-mail a cover letter (I now have a really good one, thanks to all the effort I put in before I applied for the job in the first paragraph), CV (honed nearly to death) and teaching philosophy (which I had also significantly improved a few weeks ago). It took me 15 minutes to change a few words here and there and to send it off. This application process is a bit different than the one mentioned above. It's an ongoing process - they'll start interviews right away and just keep going until the fill the position. I e-mailed at the end of the day on Tuesday, so I'm not counting that as a day. Really, it's only been one since I applied, and it is the very end of the week in which the job was first advertised. I suppose I won't give up on this on until the first couple of days of next week have passed with no word.

That's the job search update. It's been a month and a day since finding out I needed to be looking and I have to say, that while I'm not getting many bites, I'm encouraged that there are a few jobs coming out each week that are what I'm looking for. I feel like it could definitely be worse.

Stem Cell Post Coming Forthwith - Give or Take a Week

I told you earlier about the slight scolding my husband gave me about using this blog to break into scientific writing. While he thinks it's a good tool, he mentioned that I actually have to write about science. I asked him what my first post should be and he threw out that ever so easy topic......stem cells. I yelled at him for giving me something ridiculously hard and controversial to start out with while he calmly explained that I shouldn't make a mountain out of a molehill and should just keep it simple. Namely, I should just explain what stem cells are and I should explain why they are excellent for science - enough said.

I've been procrastinating my research.

But I feel that today is an appropriate day (Executive Order lifting stem cell ban) to start studying and researching that post. I'm giving myself a week's deadline - so hopefully by next Monday I'll have my first real science post up for you.

Dear HR Staffer Who Stands Between My Application and the Person Who Would Hire Me.......

Please give me a chance. As you go down the checklist of requirements for this position and compare that against my resume and cover letter please do not get stalled on the fact that I don't have quite the amount of teaching experience "preferred." Please notice that I have quite a few smaller bits of teaching and realize that I clearly tried everything I could during graduate school to teach while not causing my boss to kick me out of the lab. Please also notice that while you only require that an instructor have a Master's degree I have a Ph.D. Let that count for something. Let that be a sign to you that I have a huge amount of experience training and teaching people in the laboratory setting - and that's a good thing. Please, somehow, see between the lines and know how much I want this job and how I absolutely know that I am the right fit for it. Pass on my paperwork to the head of the division who will see what an asset I would be to your school. Know that if you let me get past this formal, fill out the forms and sign on the dotted lines portion of the process and into that part of the process that you actually get to meet me you will find a smart, eager, hard working, patient person who would make a great instructor. Really, I promise, I'm worth it. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Me